Learning Doesn’t Have to be Hard – September
26, 2005
At the café I visit each morning at the end of my
routine walk, I overheard a conversation between two dads. Their
expensive business attire, laptops and leather briefcases indicated that
they were probably on their way to high-powered jobs. This morning, they
were discussing their children’s school experiences. One child is,
according to dad, not working hard enough to reach her potential. This
child is apparently “coasting” and dad is upset because she didn’t
get a high enough mark on the first test of the school year. The other
dad’s problem was the same, but expressed in a slightly different
manner. He blamed the school, rather than the child, stating that the
curriculum isn’t challenging enough for his son, whose high marks must
mean the bar should be raised back to where it used to be when he was a
student.
It reminded me of what my mother told me over and
over when I was a kid: “It’s not worthwhile unless you work for
it!” This is the 21st century, and while there is
satisfaction in some kinds of hard work, that old cliché is no longer
true (if it ever was!). But it is perpetuated in our view of education, which says that
learning is hard, challenging, unpleasant work. But watch a young child
grow and develop and you will realize that when the time for it is
right, learning comes effortlessly. On the other hand, when we’re not
interested or engaged in – or ready for – a specific piece of
information or skill, when we are presented with a bunch of
out-of-context facts to memorize, then even paying attention (let alone
learning!) becomes unpleasant and difficult.
As I pointed out in my book Challenging Assumptions in Education, hand-in-hand
with the notion that learning is hard, goes the idea that it must be
measured…or that, in fact, it can be measured. In fact, not only do
high test results not measure the amount of learning that has taken
place, they can often signal a lack of real learning. What they likely mean
is that a great deal of time has been spent force-feeding facts into
brains so they can easily be regurgitated and perfecting the skills
associated with successful test taking.
Unfortunately, governments and taxpayers alike
value quantifiable achievement. Apparently, so do success-driven,
achievement-oriented fathers. And the easiest way to quantify the
achievement of schools, teachers and students is by measuring the
retention of a narrow, but organizable, range of information. But this
definition of academic success is a very sad boondoggle, in place to
protect and perpetuate the industry of schooling, rather than to help
children learn. And teachers are as
much victims as children.
As
Alfie Kohn says in his book What Does it Mean to be Well Educated?
(Beacon Press, 2004), “If kids are going to be forced to learn facts
without context, and skills without meaning, it’s certainly handy to
have an ideology that values difficulty for its own sake.” And if our
economy depends on the production and consumption of ever more cars,
televisions and logo-plastered t-shirts, it’s handy to encourage the
unquestioning mantra of hard work. After all, those well-meaning dads in the café
just want their kids to come out the other end of the schooling sausage maker with jobs that will allow them to buy cars, televisions, leather
briefcases and stylish business attire.
Posted: 2005/09/26
12:16 PM
